The House Intelligence chair went public with his own read of raw intelligence transcripts before properly vetting it with his colleagues. He has offered no coherent explanation as to why bypassing normal vetting channels was acceptable behavior, where the information came from, or even what he was thinking this when he decided to do it.

Nunes’s public presentation of this information was also incredibly confusing, done in a way that makes little sense unless he was deliberately trying to obscure the truth about whether the president was wiretapped.

So Nunes appears to have, in a very short amount of time, torched his own credibility in defense of a clearly false tweet sent out by Donald Trump. And he did all of this at a time when the FBI is investigating evidence that the Trump campaign may have coordinated with Russian efforts to undermine the US election — charges that the House Intelligence Committee is, in theory, supposed to be investigating as well.

This is not normal.

Yes, Trump Is 100% Vindicated On Wiretapping!

Yeppers, I said 100% vindicated, and those who disagree are either being stubbornly hyper-literal about the word "wiretap," or the placing of a "physical wiretap," or Obama himself placing the wiretap, or standing by the point Ben Shapiro makes that Trump is still wrong because the surveillance was "incidental."

I'll touch on the "incidental" issue at length in the points below, but to immediately address Ben's argument, even if the collection was incidental, once the unmasking and dissemination of that "incidental" information occurs, that is the Obama administration illegally targeting Trump using surveillance, and that is the exact same thing as outright spying. And being illegally spied on was, of course, Trump's overall claim.

As far as the THIS WASN'T A WIRETAP nonsense, it reminds me of someone accusing a 70-year-old (Trump's age) of lying when he claims someone stole his record collection after the bad guy is found only with the old man's iPod. You said records! Where's the vinyl! Where's the vinyl! Where's the vinyl!

Not for a second did I imagine Trump meant an actual physical phone tap -- you know, like you'd see Mike Connors do on "Mannix." Welcome to the 21st Century, pedants!